I disagree. It's great that Scott Alexander gathers all this information, and in the end admits he still doesn't know what the cause is. It leaves it open to further discussion.
Human behavior isn't always explicable. This is one of those deleterious behaviors which boils down to a bunch of smart people exploiting the cognitive, emotional biases of parents and students.
When I went to college - there were 30 people per 1 college placement for comp-sci. In order to even be considered u had to have top scores from high school (gold metal is better).
And that was in regional college - I can only imagine what was happening in the capital.
TIL - getting in harvard is easier. Americans have it easy.
"Gold medal" ???
You are probably from Ex-Soviet countries or one of their ex-satellites. Limiting number of people who can attend undergraduate studies by setting bar so high that 99% people will fail either by failing entrance exam or grades to get in, is a dumbest given such a prevalence of Computers everywhere.
You should look at graduates of Tsinghua and the IITs.
The IITs, as the top engineering schools in India, have a 0.92% acceptance rate. [1]
Meanwhile, Tsinghua accepts 0.92% of Beijing applicants and close to 0.1% from elsewhere in China. [2]
I've always wondered why we're so over the top about college admissions? It's weird. It's already really easy to get into our schools compared with other nations. And the data in this article really does agitate on the side of an uncompetitive application as the reason for any failure to gain admission.
This article is hitting the nail on the head. It's not a glut of international students taking up all the spots because they'll pay more. That's not why you didn't get in. It's not legacies taking your spot in the class. There really are not that many unqualified legacies at Yale and Harvard. It's not blacks or latinos taking your spot via affirmative action. The blacks and latinos at Yale, Harvard or MIT likely outclass you along any dimension on which we'd care to take a truly objective comparative measure.
Here's reality, there are just a whole lot more people trying to get into college now. It was easy before, but if you want that spot today, you have to beat out a lot more people to get it. That's why we have all the bribes and whatnot going on. If a thousand people or whatever are all going after the same spot, it's not likely yours will be the winning application. So people try to game the system instead. But even with the increased competition, our schools are relatively easy to get into. In America, you can always get into some school.
> The blacks and latinos at Yale, Harvard or MIT likely outclass you
My kids can claim hispanic status through their (very very Mexican mother) and conventional wisdom is that they can both breeze into any college they care to by checking the right box on the application. Whether that's true or not, I've always warned them not to rely on it - if they coast in and find themselves surrounded by people who know the material backward and forward while they're still struggling with the basics, they're going to end up coasting right back out.
The blacks and hispanics at MIT or wherever, they are definitely not "coasters". That's an urban myth that will be roundly dispelled about 15 minutes into a working relationship with one of them.
Back in the neolithic (1972), when I applied to college, most kids seemed to apply to two or three colleges at most. I'm not sure I even completed two applications. In the fall of 2006, my son was threatened with Saturday detention if he didn't have three safety school applications completed by the date the counselor preferred. He ended up applying to eight that I recall. A kid a year or so ahead of him at the same school applied to fourteen or eighteen. So if kids are encouraged to step up their applications to about 4x that of the boomers, will that not drive acceptance rates now?
Presumably, except at the boundary conditions, an increase in the number of applications per student comes with a corresponding decrease in the percentage of accepted applications that result in a student actually showing up to the university— in the end every student still picks only one to actually attend. These should mostly cancel out and keep the university’s acceptance rate (offers extended per application received) about the same.
>These should mostly cancel out and keep the university’s acceptance rate (offers extended per application received) about the same.
I agree w/ your argument, but there are probably other factors that have changed w/ college applications.
The article seems to disagree w/ my point below, but from my anecdotal vantagepoint, I think there is a kernel of truth to my opinion: I see many 2nd and 3rd tier schools near me (I'm in the eastern US) opening themselves up to foreign undergrads. I don't know the reason for this, but my suspicion is that these schools need to stave off the onslaught from entities like Coursera and edX. As such, they are trawling from bodies, wherever they can get them. I've met numerous foreign undergrads who can barely speak English and my thought is usually "How could the University of _______ accept you in good conscience and move you toward graduation when you can't even understand your lecturers?"
e.g., I taught a class at a local university a few years ago. Class saw an influx of students from 1 particular country over a few years. Most of the foreign students from this country could barely speak English and it was obvious from "pop" quizzes that they didn't understand the material (which is understandable if you can't understand the language). They all tried to cheat on the exams (using a remarkably elaborate scheme). Eventually, I figured it out and I failed them. The mastermind emailed me and said that he knew he did not deserve to pass, but if he failed he would need an additional semester to complete his engineering degree.[1] IMO, the university behaved unethically by admitting these students into a system that they are not equipped to legitimately succeed in.
Anyway, I assume that if you increase your applicant pool from outside the US, the acceptance rates will drop--at least for a little while. I know that's not the only reason for the drop, but it might be part of the issue.
[1] After that, I stopped getting students from that country in my class.
It's not Coursera and EdX. It's that foreign students pay full price. As administrative costs increase and infrastructure costs increase and state contributions decrease if there ever were any, the money needs to come from somewhere.
Specific programs also tend to set their own prices. Even in Canada with all public schools tuition for business, medical, veterinary, etc. Are all higher
It isn't that easy for a university. There is always the danger that more students accept their offer then expected and your classrooms are not big enough for the larger class. There are enough universities around that statistically we can expect if they all just increased their offers made rate some would get too many students attending the next fall every year.
This is only true if you ignore the average rank preference of the school among applicants. Better-ranked college won't see as much decline in acceptance percentage, while worse-ranked colleges will see more than the expected decline.
Some of the ways colleges can combat this on their own is by trying to jump the rest of the system through early admission (that creeps earlier and earlier over time), or by giving out exploding offers (I don't think this is nearly as common).
The solution is to go to a deferred-acceptance algorithm such as Gale-Shapley. It's a relatively minor change, adding a third party that matches students to colleges algorithmically. The students send in a rank-ordering of the colleges they wish to attend, and colleges send in a rank-ordering of which students they'd prefer to admit (along with quantity). The students get their most-preferred college that likes them enough to admit them over others, and the colleges run zero risk of sending out too many offers.
I'm older than your son but my guidance councilor tried to pull that "you can't apply to only one school" routine with me. I told him to piss off (nicely) and sign my application (it had to be signed by him).
It’s where you have to go to school for detention session on a Saturday morning. In school is detention during school hours (popular in the south), out of school is just not being able to come to school.
Notably, out of school detention is punishment aimed at the student's parents, not at the student, in most cases. Rarely a student who actually cares about school and their grades will receive it as punishment, and even more rarely this will be for non-BS (political) reasons. Good students can avoid BS (and much non-BS) punishment by being on a sports team, the more important (well-funded), the better, and the more important their role on it, the better.
Watch The Breakfast Club for a primer. From what I can tell it's only a thing in the US, and before moving here I thought it was, like many other things, just a literary device. Alas it's real.
Early 90s, applied to just one university (the one closest to where I was living) and got in. Only later did I realize how lucky I got (a good public university with a low acceptance rate) since I was very naive and my parents were of very little help.
I don’t know what kind of bizarre school your son went to, but I graduated HS in 2009 and nobody was forcing me to apply anywhere or threatening me if I didn’t.
The school is I think less neurotic than many in our area (prosperous, urban), and the parents vastly saner than those described by Caitlin Flanagan in her article in The Atlantic.
How much of dropping acceptance rates is simply due to students applying to more colleges? I know when I applied a few years ago, I was able to apply to over a dozen colleges simply because they all used a very similar electronic application form. [1] Were these sorts of services available, or as widely used in 2006?
you don't have to visit a school to apply. I didn't bother visiting most of my safety schools. also most of the schools I applied to either didn't do interviews or they were informational only (ie, they are only considered as an additional signal of interest).
None of them required an interview. Some offered an optional interview, which I would do if I was particularly interested in a college, but it was by no means required.
If the admissions system is easy and you don't need to physically visit or interview to apply to a college, why doesn't everyone literally apply to all colleges to cast the net as wide as possible?
If everyone did that it'd turn the system around and have the colleges bidding for and trying to attract you.
In the UK they only let you apply to some small number of colleges (universities), and only let you apply to one elite college.
You still have to pay an administrative fee to apply (Usually around $70). So, you COULD apply to all the colleges, but then you would have to pay thousands of dollars in admissions fees. You can sometimes get the fee waived if you are below some income level, so maybe there's something to that. The only time barrier really is application essays.
Like other mention, it costs a good chunk of money, but also you may have to write supplemental statements for each school depending on the application system they use.
Not OP but I know lots of people that applied to colleges they never visited.
With that said, I also know lots of people that visited lots of colleges, doing a road trip or something spring break during high school. I didn’t and honestly don’t know why someone would.
I can't understand why you'd uproot your entire life and move to somewhere for at least four years and set the tone of your social and professional life, based on somewhere you couldn't even be bothered to visit.
Getting away from your comfortable home is a good thing. Once you have agreed to leave everything you know and move it doesn't matter where you go.
Visiting local schools is important because you need to ensure that the details work. Can you get from your parents home to class during rush hour? Can you get from class to your weekend job?
If you are going far away from home though, who cares. What you can do in Fargo North Dakota are very different what you can do in Maui Hawaii, but either way you there are plenty of things to do. You will find out when you get there. If forced to either you will find something you like that you didn't know before. You will meet new friends.
You can have very different lifestyle in different communities. Moving blind to somewhere you have no understanding of is a recipe for unhappiness when you find it doesn’t suit you due to climate, politics, economics, etc.
For example moving to a college and realising you can’t get anywhere in the area without driving and you’re a walking person.
Only if you are so closed minded that you cannot learn to enjoy something different. I know many such people, they wouldn't go to any college not close to home. I also know many people who have moved to different countries blindly and had the best time of their lives because they can enjoy something new.
Either way visiting campus isn't really required, either you are cut out for anything or you already are not cut out because it isn't close to home.
I think you think I’m arguing to go to college at home - nobody here said that you’ve imagined it.
You’re arguing you’ll probably be fine wherever so don’t bother yourself to learn anything about the community you’ll be joining before you go. I’m saying do research into where you want to be. How can you argue against informing yourself?
I'm not arguing against all research (though this is obviously not clear). I'm arguing visiting campus and the town are not useful research in general. You should research your proposed school to make sure that you can get the type of education you want: that is why you go to a school, to get an education. If you can get the education you want, that is important.
Note, if you are disabled in some way you might need to research campus and town are accessible to your needs. Most people don't have this consideration.
I visited the colleges which I hadn't visited pre-application after I got accepted, and that wasn't unusual in my social circle. Applying to ten schools sight-unseen is cheaper and takes less time than visiting a single non-local school, so it can be more efficient to wait to evaluate a school until after you find out if it's even an option for you.
What a great article. Loved the mix of historical references mixed with statistical data. Easily better than any news article I've read on college admissions issue. It's so rare that an article exceeds my expectations.
Somehow the idea that this is all caused by people applying to more places doesn't cut it to me. It might account for some of it, but not all of it. A lot of this is probably fairly chaotic and complex. For example, the GI bill probably contributed directly somewhat also, but also probably led to cultural shifts because of the veteran population, which then in turn changed career and educational expectations, but the GI bill itself reflects WWII, which also reflects cataclysmic societal changes (that is, WWII caused many significant things, but was also caused by many significant things).
Speaking as someone who has done research on selection and standard testing, and whose first-hand experiences support what I see from the theory and research, this is kind of horrifying, because it inevitably leads to increases in bullshit.
The accuracy of any of the selection methods we use in education is very poor. It just is. Standardized tests, "holistic review", all of it. It's not useless, but it is poor. It's the sort of thing that works well for a certain level of selectivity, but not past it. Once you go past it, you're selecting on well-impressioned noise, and incentivizing bullshit.
Somehow this all seems related in my mind to the rise of concerns about replicability in science, college admissions scams, and the age of fraud in general (https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/04/th...). Something is broken. Probably many things.
The SAT reliably correlates with IQ, and of any psychometric variable we are able to measure, IQ has the strongest correlation with long-term socioeconomic success. Insofar as it is useful to funnel smart people into college, using the SAT is a good way to filter them.
I'm curious, as someone who was slightly involved with a documentary [1] exposing pitfalls of standardized testing. Generally the SAT only has shown a weak correlation between test scores and first year (some studies I read showed only first semester, but I don't have them on hand right now) collegiate performance [2].
>Generally the SAT only has shown a weak correlation between test scores and first year [...] collegiate performance [2].
That's not what your cite says. The InsideHigherEd article actually shows a strong correlation between SAT and grades but Aquinas identified a minority % of schools where it didn't. Please carefully read the 3 bullet points again and notice the minority percentages.
Your qualifier of "Generally" in your comment is misrepresenting Aguinis' findings.
I hate that piece because most of what he's referring to has been dealt with for decades. It's like "narcissist who knows nothing about a field doesn't bother to learn anything about it and as a result takes down a strawman to make himself look good."
Taleb should stay in his lane. He sounds like a "get off my lawn" old douche when he talks about anything other than financial markets. His central tenet in that article is that IQ doesn't correlate with wealth and is therefore useless. How enlightening.
SAT presumably tests you have learned certain things in high school and so are ready for university. E.g. you won’t show up to your first university math class needing to learn all of high school math, and thus be unable to complete the class.
There is a Supreme Court ruling that IQ tests are assumed to unfairly disadvantage minority candidates. This was in the context of employment rather than college admissions, but I don't think anyone has been bold enough to test whether it applies.
Broadly speaking, IQ tests tend to include a lot of cultural assumptions and therefore members of the in-group will test higher than members of out-groups of the same aptitude. IQ tests are therefore treated as discriminatory (disproportionate impact) "by default." The administration of a particular test for a specific purpose can usually be OK'd by either showing that particular test is not discriminatory, or by showing that particular test has a measurable correlation to the specific purpose for which it's used. My understanding is that "specific purpose" in the employment context means the individual job description, not just hiring in general.
> There is a Supreme Court ruling that IQ tests are assumed to unfairly disadvantage minority candidates
I wonder if there's an "IQ test" that unfairly disadvantages non-minority candidates. It would be interesting to see the results if the same pool of people (minority and non-minority) take both tests.
So I agree with you about SAT <-> IQ, and IQ <-> SES. However...
IQ isn't the only correlate of success. I think if you look at it all, there's a large dose of conscientiousness (which standardized testing companies are now going after), and attractiveness/charisma...
... but that's on the individual side of things. There's also a whole host of societal and random stuff that is outside the control of the individual, or maybe is significant to a person, but that studies tend to treat as irrelevant.
Also, saying that the SAT is useful as a selection device doesn't mean it's the only useful selection device, or that as a selection device it's very good. Offhand I don't remember the numbers, but standardized test score probably correlates .45 or so with first-year college grades? Think about that for a second. First, that's a ton of noise. That's not very predictive at all. Second, that's first-year college grades. Change the criterion but it's still the same: your best tool really is a pretty fuzzy predictor.
So now take this very fuzzy predictor, add some other fuzzy predictors that at best get things up to like maybe .6 correlation? Still fuzzy. Now you're going to be really selective on these things? What you're going to end up with is a lot of people who would have done as well but for whom the stars didn't align right at a particular period in their life. But now we as a society have this crazy income inequality, rent-seeking monopolies of all forms, and a general winner-takes all climate, so these small meaningless differences get amplified tenfold.
The conversations about this too have this kind of all-or-nothing quality, like you're forced to choose between "standardized tests are meaningless" or "standardized tests are valid predictors for a large portion of people so we need to treat them as infallible predictors for everyone." The truth is really much greyer than these positions: yes they predict, but they predict pretty weakly, all things considered, and generally for people who fit into a certain box. This all might be fine, except now we've structured our society in part around these oversimplified assumptions, pretending it works when it doesn't really. It might be ok when there's lots of second chances, lots of opportunities for people to get back on their feet from the vagaries of life, and good opportunities in general for everyone, but when resources gets hoarded by fewer and fewer, there's more noise, that's compounded by people gaming the system, etc. etc. etc.
Just as a thought exercise: what do most human traits look like in terms of distribution? They're pretty normal, pretty Gaussian. What does income look like? Not that, not at all. The discrepancy between them should be shocking to everyone.
IQ is a lot like GDP. It doesn't measure what we need as accurately as we need. If you keep that in mind, though, it can remain a broadly useful metric.
> The accuracy of any of the selection methods we use in education is very poor. It just is.
The SAT when combined with the high school GPA (HSGPA) has an adjusted correlation correlation coefficient of 0.56 with first-year GPA, meaning the combined measurement accurately predicts how a potential college applicant will perform in their first year of college 56% of the time. [1]
That's actually pretty good, what other proposed metrics can say their signals match outcomes with 56% validity? How much you liked their essay?
Lower SAT scores have about 63% retention rate for first-year students whereas high SAT scores have about a 95% retention rate [2]. That is, high schoolers with poor SATs drop out of college about 40% of the time in their first year.
Standardized tests have many problems -- obviously -- but no one has developed a less unfair system.
When colleges abandon standardized tests what else are they relying on? Random signals made up by admissions officers? That's worse than job interviewing.
I have no problem criticizing standardized testing, but I feel everyone who does should be obligated to propose a better alternative method with a higher validity rate than 56%.
> The SAT when combined with the high school GPA (HSGPA) has an adjusted correlation correlation coefficient of 0.56 with first-year GPA, meaning the combined measurement accurately predicts how a potential college applicant will perform in their first year of college 56% of the time.
I'm summarizing for a general audience. I could say, r is " the strength of the linear relationship between two variables on a graph" but I'm not sure that helps the average person understand the connection.
If you have a better description, it's more helpful to chime in with that instead of "You're wrong!"
A better summary would be that those two quantities explain about half of the variation, not that they predict accurately half the time.
If you took a random sample of cases, half of them wouldn’t exhibit a direct relationship b/w SAT and first year GPA and half nothing (unless the data is _super_ weird). Instead, SAT would be instructive-ish in predicting first year GPA for all those cases.
Explaining half the variation, and the other half?
The point was to draw a connection for the general audience, not present the most scientifically accurate description of a relationship between two variables -- that's what the links to the research are for.
>A better summary would be that those two quantities explain about half of the variation, not that they predict accurately half the time.
Frankly this is not correct either, that would be right if we were talking about a coefficient of determination aka R^2 but we are not. we are talking about correlation coefficients which are totally different.
>Explaining half the variation, and the other half?
In the context of coefficients of determination(WHICH ARE NOT RELEVANT IN THIS CASE) this would mean that those variables explains 50% of the variance and the other 50% is either unexplained or explained by other variables.
>If you have a better description, it's more helpful to chime in with that instead of "You're wrong!"
>the combined measurement accurately predicts how a potential college applicant will perform in their first year of college 56% of the time
Your statement was indeed totally wrong and honestly the lack of statistical understanding in this thread, among all participants, is a little disturbing.
Correlation coefficients imply just that, correlation. Nothing more, your "simplification" was totally incorrect and makes implications which are in no way supported by the data.
Your own citation explains correlation quite clearly -
"A correlation indicates the extent to which variables are
linearly related and can range from –1.0 to 1.0 (Miles and
Shevlin, 2001). A correlation of 1.0, for example, indicates
a perfect positive linear relationship. A general rule of
thumb for interpreting correlation coefficients is offered
by Cohen (1988): a small correlation has an absolute value
of approximately 0.1; a medium correlation has an absolute
value of approximately 0.3; and a large correlation has an
absolute value of approximately 0.5 or higher"
Theres no way to simplify this as correlation is already one of the simplest concepts in statistics...
It's good to communicate for a general audience, but your presentation misleads rather than simplifies.
> meaning the combined measurement accurately predicts how a potential college applicant will perform in their first year of college 56% of the time.
"accurately predicts...56% of the time" implies that half of predictions are 'accurate', which most readers would interpret as 'correct' i.e. knowing SAT + HSGPA allows you to state FYGPA _exactly_ for about half of cases. That's not what the research you cited says. Rather, the square of the multiple correlation R (which is exactly R^2, the coefficient of determination) indicates how much of the variance in the output variable is explained by the input variables. That quantity _must_ be communicated in terms of the strength of the relationship, not accuracy for a given or share of cases as it doesn't tell us anything about a given case. One could say it tells us about 30% (0.56^2, correction from my statement above) of the information we'd need to know to perfectly predict the outcome, or that the relationship is better than random, but doesn't predict perfectly, or ...
Additionally, table 5 of the link you cited indicates the adjust correlation coefficient b/w FYGPA and the combination of HSGPA and SAT is 0.62. None of the numbers in that table are 0.56, so I'm not sure where you pulled that exact number from. I've used 0.56/56% above to be clear which quantity I'm referring to.
Uh...this is exactly what I mean. Your description is 100% scientifically accurate but probably way beyond the average reader.
Again, if you can simplify this in a way more accurate than I have, great, be my guest-- I look forward to reading it.
R^2, coefficient of determination, output variable variance, etc etc -- most readers aren't going to go that deep in the math. For those who do, like you, the links to the actual research is provided.
But so far all I see are data scientists complaining about how my description is not 100% statistically accurate without providing any alternative explanation that doesn't devolve into variance of output variables.
Again, be my guest to show me I'm wrong, but what you wrote above is not something that would be easy to understand for the general audience, IMHO.
The concerning (mis)interpretation of your statement is what I said on the third line above:
> "accurately predicts...56% of the time" implies that half of predictions are 'accurate', which most readers would interpret as 'correct' i.e. knowing SAT + HSGPA allows you to state FYGPA _exactly_ for about half of cases.
This interpretation is easy to arrive at, and clearly does not correspond to a reasonable understanding of the source, even for a general audience.
I provide two suggestions above:
> One could say it tells us about 30% of the information we'd need to know to perfectly predict the outcome, or that the relationship is better than random, but doesn't predict perfectly
OK, but that only makes it more confusing. You say it tells us about 30% of the information we'd need to know...which makes it sound (to the lay person) like there's no connection because 70% of the information is elsewhere!
I appreciate your commitment to academic rigor but sometimes oversimplifying things, even at the cost of mathematical accuracy, is enough for a general audience who aren't going to compute variance of output variables.
This isn't about academic or mathematical rigor - this is about responsible communication of statistics.
You're right that a general audience isn't going to look at the source, nor think about variance of output variables. Therefore, it's the responsibility of us as communicators of statistics to relate the conclusions that can be drawn from the data in a way that first and foremost is not wrong or misleading, and secondly captures the concept as accurately as possible for the audience.
The first principle is the overriding obligation. Your simplification can capture as little of the information and conclusions supported by the data as you want, but it cannot imply or state conclusions that are not supported.
You're getting this response to your statement, from me and others, because your interpretation of the source can easily be read as drastically overstating the character (and strength) of the relationship supported by the data - even if that's not what you intended.
To you this is the major responsibility, but not to everyone.
I'm getting this response to my statement, from you and many other data scientists, who can't accept oversimplifying math, but all of whom have failed to produce a general description in plain English.
In some ways it's like the test-- everyone hates it but no one has a better alternative. You've complained maybe 7 or 8 times in this thread about how scientifically inaccurate my general summary is but have not produced a description that a regular person could understand in 5 words or less, with no technical jargon.
"Something is partially explained by a combination of numbers"?
That says nothing semantic of value. Better to exaggerate the causal relationship and give a sense of meaning than offer meaningless generics like that, because at least the general reader intuits a sense of the universe of the relationship. The above implies nothing.
1) Your description is 0% correct; and
2) It's not a complaint. Maybe you don't know what a correlation coefficient is. That's okay -- I don't know what polyfinite rings are.
The problem is not plain English, the problem is that you want to make claims that are more specific than your numbers allow you to.
"Correlation is a number in [-1,1] where -1 means predictably inversely related and 1 means predictably directly related". What is correlation 0.5? There isn't even an unique definition of "correlation", man.
The best thing you could do is to produce a table of correlation coefficients for comparison. That would communicate some qualitative nuance as to what a 0.5 correlation really means.
You can also try to do something like a bootstrap or kernel density or use a prior distribution to claim that the probability that increment dx leads to an increment of dy or more is... That's more technically involved, but satisfies your desire of saying something specific that correlation coefficients do not allow you to say.
Kernel density, bootstrap, using prior distribution, increment the derivative...all this stuff is so far above and beyond the ordinary person.
You and a couple of others have provided plenty of context for the serious data scientist who wants to understand the exact nature of the relationship between these two variables, but 99% of readers do not understand much less want to read about "kernel density".
Again, my challenge remains open: instead of complaining about inaccuracy, try to render the relationship in plain English.
Lol. I was giving a basic intro for the 99% of readers who don't care about "kernel density" or controlling for output variables -- the fact that you conflate such an attempt with a "quantitative analysis" (which it was not) coupled with your unwillingness or inability to give a plain English description just proves my point.
That's not summarizing. "It's the strength of the relationship" is summarizing. "The combined measurement accurately predicts how a potential college applicant will perform in their first year of college 56% of the time" is just wrong. See Anscombe's quartet for a great example of why it's just plain wrong.
"It's how perfectly you can fit a straight line to them."
You can be mathematically accurate without being mathematically precise. Better imprecise but correct than incorrect but precise.
If you're trying to give a quantitative lay picture of what exactly 0.56 linear correlation means, you need to still be quantitatively right, while the above are quantitative. Pictures and examples can help. "For perspective, 0.56 is about the correlation between <example> and <example>"
Saying there is a quantitative strength to a relationship is, to a regular person, meaningless. Am I .56 in love with my wife?
Can I fit in a straight line to her?
These are not good descriptions. Of course HN is full of data scientists who wildly object to oversimplifying statistical relationships -- luckily you are here to give the detailed mathematical context. But these are not simplified descriptions for a general audience.
> Saying there is a quantitative strength to a relationship is, to a regular person, meaningless.
That the average person would not understand a particular accurate description of a subject does not, in and of itself, make a completely inaccurate alternative description less wrong or even a good simplification.
Correlation is not probability. You can't compare them at all. Flipping a coin for each student would produce a correlation of 0, far lower than the correlation of 0.56 cited above. Have a look at some plots of data [1] with different correlation coefficients to see how dramatic it can be. Note the difference between r = 0.00 and r = 0.60. That's about what we're dealing with here.
>The SAT when combined with the high school GPA (HSGPA) has an adjusted correlation correlation coefficient of 0.56 with first-year GPA, meaning the combined measurement accurately predicts how a potential college applicant will perform in their first year of college 56% of the time.
This is a totally incorrect interpretation of what Correlation means. Correlation is generally a very weak measure and the .56 value only tells you there is a "Medium - High" level of correlation between the two things being measured. Nothing more. This is discussed in the paper you linked.
>The SAT when combined with the high school GPA (HSGPA) has an adjusted correlation correlation coefficient of 0.56 with first-year GPA, meaning the combined measurement accurately predicts how a potential college applicant will perform in their first year of college 56% of the time.
This is a totally incorrect interpretation of what correlation is.
Again, I'm summarizing for a general audience. If you have a better way to describe it that doesn't devolve into polynomials and linear relationships between variables on a graphs it's more helpful to do so than just say, "You're totally incorrect!"
The difficult solution is increasing the accuracy and “trustability” of k12 assessments. As is, high school educators are not assessing their student in a manner that allows for real judgements of their students’ knowledge/capabilities/creativity/etc. by an outside party. We spend immense amounts of money, time, and effort creating and assessing students in school, but the results are only useful with the context of progressing within those specific courses.
Trustable assessments would go a long way to accurately rewarding merit.
Currently standardized testing better predicts future academic performance than years of GPA, which in a way is the sum of teachers’ views on a student.
But teachers still prefer teachers over standard tests, and they shun conversation with their researching peers. The classroom is their kingdom and that’s how people prefer it.
“Teacher tests” often have different objectives than solely measuring one student’s ability compared to another. Likewise, the investments made in the creation of standardized tests are not likely to be matched by classroom teachers due to logistical constraints even if they have the necessary knowledge to create an equally valid assessment.
The objective should be the creation of a system that allows teachers to retain the flexibility to modify curriculum in a manner appropriate to their specific student population while also maintaining the trust and reliability benefits found in standardized tests.
Maybe it is our expectation for everything to be fair, straightforward and honest that is broken?
These expectations are the root of the current outrage culture. It's as if now that we have these wonderful technological advances we assume every problem should have been solved by now, and get outraged when we realize we don't live in a utopia.
"3.4: Could the issue be that students are just trying harder?"
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without making a value judgment about it,
I think an underappreciated aspect of our current spot in history is that we've had an explosion of resources that ambitious, resourceful people can leverage.
Increasingly these resources don't have gatekeepers around them, and there isn't anything keeping highschoolers from accessing them.
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I suspect the kids actually in the running for Harvard similar places, have accomplished much more than those kids would have accomplished 20 years or so ago.
other way, kids today have access to the resources that Zuck's generation built (I actually think youtube, twitter, wordpress, amazon, and even Hacker News are much for helpful for an ambitious kid than facebook is, but whatever)
I definitely agree with the "The risk of not joining the elites at 18 should be lowered if anything else. "
The media and pundits often push a narrative that society is 'dumbing-down,' regressing, or that standards are being lowered, and maybe to some degree they are depending on where one looks, but we also see evidence of increased competitiveness and higher standards. Cramming for AP courses and SATs have become the norm for an increasingly large number of high schoolers. High-stakes testing is also common for New York's elite public and private primary and secondary schools. A high school grad who gets high AP and SAT scores and a 4.0 GPA is demonstrably smarter and more competent than someone than from generations ago without such scores and credentials.
Yeah, I'm not really sure where that narrative even comes from - I don't think we can argue that the country is being "dumbed down" while Stanford, etc don't have trouble filling their freshman class.
Ironically, the people perhaps pushing the narrative are often themselves HYPSM grads and beneficiaries of elite status. Same with the folks who claim "the college you go to doesn't matter".
IMHO the biggest problem with US college admissions is that it is very subjective and dependent on hidden variables.
I still don't understand why someone can apply with no major but has to write essays about life experiences and aspirations and what they want to do in life. And, test scores matter but not really and also different classes of people (race, gender, legacy, sports, economic) have different score scales.
All this makes it very unclear and hidden causing additional stress.
Why can SAT/ACT and perhaps school GPA be the sole criteria? And for sports, affirmative action,.. just have separate additional seats.
However, it exacerbates other problems. As I mentioned in a sibling comment,
"Objective" testing in a country without safety nets, like the US, would enable (more) class discrimination. Here is a surprising example of that in France (where I observed that first hand) http://phdcomics.com/comics.php?n=1292
Theirs is a system that “funnels” people without giving them much choice. I can see the issue in that.
But how about this: an objective test that anyone can take however many times they want, as long as they have a high school diploma.
That’s essentially the Brazilian system. There are arguments to be made about well off kids still getting an advantage because their parents can afford prep schools, but the government counters (at least partially) that by introducing quotas for certain disadvantaged groups.
I have many misgivings about many things in Brazil, but I do think the university admissions process down there is the fairest I’ve seen in my life.
> Why can SAT/ACT and perhaps school GPA be the sole criteria? And for sports, affirmative action,.. just have separate additional seats.
scholastic aptitude is a very important part of admissions criteria, but it's not the only thing colleges care about. for example, they also care about things like extracurriculars because these indicate that a student is more likely to participate in campus organizations.
you personally might not care about orgs and sports teams (I certainly didn't) but some of the students they want to attract do. there needs to be a critical mass of sports and orgs people to make these things viable.
For one thing, it simply isn't possible to have truly "objective" criteria for admissions.
If it were only based on standardized test scores, the bulk of the students that got in to the most elite schools would be ones who went to elite private high schools and perhaps had extra highly-paid tutoring or those who enjoyed the obsessive life-long dedication of a tiger-mom. That would skew the population to students from a narrow demographic along with a very small number of unicorns. Forget about late-bloomers, promising students that went to crappy high-schools, forget about making up for decades of exclusionary practices. And after all that, guess what, the children of the uber-rich would STILL get in because a pile of money big enough to pay for a building will ALWAYS bend reality.
The most elite schools will always have their admissions under a magnifying glass, but there's a lot of excellent universities out there which offer a superb education and don't have outrageous admissions requirements. A student who got top-scores and excellent grades can still go to their pick of a large number of these other fine schools if they get rejected from Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Stanford/MIT/Caltech because of losing out to some intangible criteria.
>A student who got top-scores and excellent grades can still go to their pick of a large number of these other fine schools if they get rejected from Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Stanford/MIT/Caltech because of losing out to some intangible criteria.
This is both correct and why the Asian students' Harvard suits offend me. If we're holding the bar at Harvard or zilch, what the hell did I spend 4 years of my time on?
> A student who got top-scores and excellent grades can still go to their pick of a large number of these other fine schools if they get rejected from Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Stanford/MIT/Caltech because of losing out to some intangible criteria.
That's me! I was rejected from one of those schools and ended up at a "tier 2" school, and have been very successful. IOW, getting rejected from a "tier 1" school isn't a big deal, and a student may be better off at a "lesser" school.
There is a simple explanation: Academics is not the primary focus at most top schools outside of perhaps MIT, Caltech and Chicago. When it comes down to it, their goal is to develop the next generation of 'elites', and the basic MO is to get a bunch of current gen elites and surround them with a cross-section of the society, so that their education is 'well-rounded'.
Edit: this comment, while obviously passing some judgment on elite schools, should not be taken as an endorsement of the parent comment. Admitting based on test scores has severe issues in a society where schooling quality and resources are so unevenly distributed.
If I were a school I would just recruit people based on their instagram, selecting for physical attractiveness, psychopathic tendencies, creativity, narcissism and/or special skills/talents.
They already do. It's just more subtle and complex... but they do review social media. And narcissism and psychopathy is going to bring you big points. Those things let you get the things they want to see (school president, etc)
If school quality and resources are not evenly distributed, don't 'hollistic' admission policies make things worse?
A poor person can study for the SATs just like the rich kids (expensive tutors don't actually raise the score very much), but there is no way they will have the same opportunities (money, time, connections) for the sort of fancy extracurriculars that rich kids do to impress admission committees.
Yes of course. My critique of the system as one meant for the fostering of elites carries the corollary that it's not a great one for underprivileged students.
The actual solution is not messing around with admission criteria, but rather tackling the unequal distribution of opportunity at the primary and secondary school level.
I’ve tried bringing up this point with multiple people and always get shot down.
When I compare the American system to my home country’s system, which based on thorough, objective testing, people tell me the US system is better in terms of determining if someone is “college material.”
IMO the extremely subjective nature of it only enables discrimination.
"Objective" testing in a country without safety nets, like the US, would enable (more) class discrimination. Here is a surprising example of that in France (where I observed that first hand) http://phdcomics.com/comics.php?n=1292
> I still don't understand why someone can apply with no major but has to write essays about life experiences and aspirations and what they want to do in life.
Because of what corporate HR calls "cultural fit". Harvard is not looking necessarily for top students or even students with the most potential. It's looking for "Harvard men". While there is some well-grounded suspicion that corporate HR cultural fit is a mask for discrimination, we know this was the case with university admissions. MIT is an academic powerhouse because it was willing to take the influx of smart Jewish kids that applied to Harvard after WWII and didn't get in because they were Jewish.
Because getting into US college is all about compliance, commitment and leverage.
This is the ideal person for an ivy league:
- Parents moved to an expensive zip code so kid gets into good schools
- Parents and kids deal with lots of bureaucracies. Clubs, pastimes and volunteering... which are all specifically designed to get you into college. These places don't motivate critical thinking. They REQUIRE constant observance of rules and compliance to the rule makers.
- Massive student loans for the majority
The whole idea is that if someone graduates as a reporter, that person might voluntarily choose to not talk about things like, how we started a war of aggression to further our economic interest.
This goes also for the engineer working on the latest westernization of some random object/system.
Colleges don't want the best and the brightest. They want the best and the brightest... who are compliant and who have lots invested in the 'system'... commitment leads to leverage. They want 'team players'.
They also want to give as much advantage as they can to the existing elites. So... they require things that require money. That way they can say, 'we aren't turning away the best and brightest'... we are just turning away people who are smarter in favor of 'team players' who went to school practice, and ballet, and the model UN, and etc... which are of course out of reach for the average US family.
What I think you and a lot of fellow commenters are missing is the history of higher education in the US. In many countries in Europe, universities were established by the state and the state promotes its values through admission criteria. The imperial Chinese civil service exam system started in 650, and so they have also been working with the idea of outside examination for educational advancement for a long time (longer than Europe).
In the US, a solid majority of colleges -- including the Ivies -- were established first as religious institutions. Harvard and Yale were established to educate clergy (first) and also civil servants maybe. All these colleges in the Midwest that collectively provide a substantial portion of college education: established by religious groups, often along ethnic lines. Bible colleges were the first colleges in America.
At their founding, these colleges were not interested in just educating the 'smartest'. They were founded to pass on values within certain communities. Protestant colleges and Catholic colleges were not interchangeable. Lutheran colleges and Presbyterian colleges were not interchangeable. Swedish Lutheran and Norwegian Lutheran colleges are not quite interchangeable! While many of these colleges have left religion in their pasts, others have not. I taught for two years at a Lutheran college and interviewed at a Catholic college for a tenure-track position, and have spent time at two R1 land-grant institutions. All these institutions have explicitly different goals. Using the SAT/ACT and GPA to admit students to a Lutheran institution that still has a service every day and starts events with prayer just doesn't work for anyone, while the land-grant institution has a particular focus on economic and academic development for the geographic region.
Perhaps my opinion is a bit stupid, but I frankly don’t view attending a top college as such an important thing. The point of a career is to eat and live with some dignity. I don’t think you need a top school for this. If you’re much more ambitious, maybe you want to contribute in a higher way to society with your career. If you’re on a path where it’s obvious to others you’re doing this and likely to be successful, you’ll probably end up at the top school naturally. If not, you’ll probably end up somewhere better fit for your level. I frankly consider the state school honors kids to be the intellectual elites of their communities and the top school kids to be some weird combination of academic parents, childhood interventions (extra math tutoring etc.), extreme striving, VERY abnormal talent in a specific academic area, or, as recent events have shown, nepotism
How about we drop all criteria for admitting students into colleges ? Instead we increase the coursework load and passing requirements ? They can all get in but they can't get out unless they are exceptional students ?
That is actually a good point. As an technology employer, I am looking for exceptional students as my business depends on solving hard problems of technical nature and I will be drawn to schools that have this reputation. However, there might be firms that require students with connections and other skills and they would recruit at Yale or similarly focused universities.
This is exactly what happens at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich. By law, ETH is required to admit any Swiss secondary school graduate - to compensate, the courses are designed to filter out students. As a result, about 50% [1] of the entering class will drop out. This system is not likely to be popular in the US.
When I was young and considering college in the 80's, I knew that they considered grades as well as extracurriculars - sports, clubs, activities, volunteerism, etc. Where I lived, there were few opportunities for that sort of thing and I couldn't afford the ones that there were, so I hoped my grades would be enough. I did OK, I suppose, but now that I'm a parent and coaching my own teenagers through college prep, I can't help but notice how expensive, time-consuming and out-of-reach all of these college-admissions-approved extracurricular activities are for all but the upper-middle class. My kids have done sports, band, dance, church and camps their whole lives, and all of those have been time consuming, expensive or both.
The author sort of casually dismisses foreign enrollment but then also focuses on UC which seems like cherry-picking. There are 6500 foreign nationals enrolled at UCB alone in 2018. That is up by 600% in the last 15 years alone. The entire UC system has 45k foreign nationals enrolled, up from only 8k in 1999.
You may be interested in the view from up North. Joseph Heath, a Canadian academic has commented on how the top three Canadian schools teach more students than the top ten American schools. I'll excerpt:
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But of course there’s a reason that it’s so difficult to get into Yale – it’s because Yale has only 5,400 students, in a country of over 315 million people! By contrast, McGill has over 30,000, and University of Toronto has 67,000 undergraduates, serving a country of only 35 million people. That means there’s roughly one spot at Yale for every 58,000 Americans, compared to one spot at McGill for every 1,100 Canadians. No wonder American life is more competitive.
Furthermore, all of the best schools in the United States are tiny. Here is a list of the top 10, as ranked by U.S. News & World Report, along with the number of students (undergraduate, I believe):
Princeton: 5,336
Harvard: 6,658
Yale: 5,405
Columbia: 6,068
Stanford: 7,063
Chicago: 5,590
Duke: 6,655
MIT: 4,503
Upenn: 9,682
CIT: 997
Dartmouth: 4,193
That means the top 10 universities in the United States – a country of over 315 million people – at any given time are educating a grand total of only 62,150 students.
By contrast, here are the rough numbers of undergraduates at the top 3 Canadian universities:
McGill: 30,000
UBC: 47,500
UofT: 67,000
So the top 3 Canadian schools are at any given time educating a grand total of 144,500 students – more than twice the total of the top 10 U.S. schools. (In fact, the University of Toronto alone has more student capacity than the top 10 U.S. schools combined.) The United States has almost exactly 9 times the population of Canada, so in order to have the same sort of capacity in higher education, the top 27 schools in the United States would have to have 1.3 million students."
I should also add that U of T, McGill and UBC are extremely good schools, and the people who go to them are very smart. I teach LSAT prep, and find that students at those schools tend to have high average scores, comparable to the US top ten.
I have no idea why US schools don't take more students. Whichever one of them broke ranks would make untold amount of money.
I wonder if part of the issue is that they're generally non-profits and so money motivation doesn't work the same way it would in the private sector. Meanwhile, the US government system is generally broken and so no one pushes the universities to expand the same way Canadian ones do.
Artificial scarcity (like diamonds) to keep their rank and prestige. If everybody gets to go to MIT, then it's just another regular college and the prestige of being the "best" in order to get in will be lost. I want to know what rest of the ranks after top 10 look like and how many students they're taking.
The thing is, those top three are quite prestigious in Canada. Maybe not as prestigious, but being a smaller country we have less room for minor shifts in ranking value.
MIT could make 5x the money while still taking in extremely qualified students. But, they're a non-profit, so they don’t really care about money. The prestige has more of a perceived value.
Us top 10 schools have a lot of money. But you’d be astounded to see what they could collect if they were truly profit motivated.
If US schools are Veblen goods then we can look to luxury goods as a comparison.
Consider Ray Ban/Burberry who at points in the past crossed the line from exclusivity into mass market and suffered a reputation hit, only to go under new management and tightly control the supply.
Some of the top US universities do take far more students, they just don't show up at the top of US News rankings. UC Berkeley, for example, enrolls 30,853 undergraduates and 11,666 graduate students[1], but isn't in the top 20 on the USnoozeAndWorldDistort rankings.
Interestingly, the elite research universities on your list above do enroll comparable numbers of graduate students to Berkeley (or Michigan, UCLA). The big difference is in the undergraduate enrollment. Also interesting is the way the list shuffles up when you consider top PhD programs or top science and engineering programs. Many of the schools in the top 10 on the US News List are replaced by top-50 schools with a much larger representation of public universities.
Berkeley, for instance, by many measurements, has more top-5 PhD programs (a good representation of department strength in research) than any other university, including Harvard and Stanford. Michigan isn't far behind (and keep in mind, Berkeley's med school is split off into UCSF).
Even US News's engineering school rankings, which I do think overwhelmingly favor very small private universities with large endowments, show this trend.
There are privates on there (Stanford, MIT, Columbia), but now you have Berkeley, Michigan, Georgia Institute of Technology, Purdue, University of Illinois, and UC San Diego and Texas at Austin at the 11th spot.
One thing the US News report rankings don't do is reward scale, but scale does matter. UCLA, for instance, enrolls more low income students than the entire Ivy League combined. Until recently, this was true of Berkeley as well, and numbers are still much much higher there - not just as a percentage, but in absolute numbers.
Private universities receive a lot of subsidies and favorable tax treatment on the grounds that they provide a public good - personally, I'm not enthusiastic about providing this subsidy to universities with massive endowments that enroll a tiny number of students.
http://greyenlightenment.com/college-a-necessary-evil/ In spite of increased debt and tuition, no matter how you crunch the numbers, college grads--especially 'high-ROI' subjects such as computer sci, econ, math etc.--do better than non-grads. And the gap in wages and employment between grads and non-grads, especially since 2009, is the widest it has ever been and shows no signs of narrowing. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, college is more expensive but also more necessary, partially due to the continued decline of manufacturing jobs, but the failure of middle-class, medium-skill jobs such as construction and auto to recover to their pre-crisis peaks .
And this is the WORST university we give a ranking to? A $309,000 estimated return on investment, not-adjusted-for-major. You have to visit Payscale, click “See Full List”, and scroll past 1,752 colleges before you find one that doesn’t have a positive RoI — not-adjusted-for-major.
I wonder what happens if you include all the people who do a few years, drop out, and never get a degree. Graduating from college still makes sense if you can do it, but lots more people start college than graduate, especially as you start getting to less selective schools.
Bryan Caplan's book[1] has a chapter where he specifically aims to control for this, and to separately calculate the ROI of different levels of education for "Excellent", "Good", "Fair", and "Poor" students. The main result was that college is a good deal for Excellent/Good students, a terrible choice for Poor students, and only makes sense for Fair students in special cases (e.g. they got a scholarship, or plan to study engineering).
The bad ROI for Fair and Poor students is mostly driven by their lower probability of actually graduating and getting the degree.
Note that this is an argument for sending your child to college. It is not an argument for sending more children to college. A large portion of what makes a college degree valuable is that companies preferentially allocate white-collar jobs to college graduates. The marginal college graduation merely exacerbates this positional advantage, rather than generating more white-collar jobs to allocate.
> The marginal college graduation merely exacerbates this positional advantage, rather than generating more white-collar jobs to allocate.
I'm pretty sure the market clearing quantity of college-educated labor increases with supply just like most goods and services, so, yes, the marginal college graduation should increase the number of white-collar jobs (and reduces rather than exacerbates the positional advantage, because in addition to increasing market clearit quantity, increased supply reduces market clearing price.)
>the marginal college graduation should increase the number of white-collar jobs
I'm arguing that this degree-required job isn't created ex-nihilo, but rather at the expense of the "best" job that used to not have a degree requirement. In other words, the average price of hiring a college graduate goes down because we're now hiring them as daycare workers and firefighters, and the positional advantage of a college degree now includes eligibility for these jobs.
A solution to an increased number of applications per candidate is to use a modified version of the stable marriage problem. [1] This is how medical rotations and a few other positions are filled.
I think this analysis is excellent, but I don't think the Common App explains the increase in applications-per-admission. There's another significant factor that causes students to apply to dozens of schools: No one can accurately forecast what a given school will cost anymore.
At some point (I believe in the late '00s, but could be wrong), elite schools started to extend their financial aid programs to include students from middle-class families. Harvard announced this in 2007[1], Yale and Princeton followed quickly, and most other elite schools seem to have done similar things, albeit with more constrained resources.
Prior to this change, a student from a family with middle-class income or above could know with reasonable certainty what a given college would cost: they would expect to pay the tuition, fees, etc. listed on the brochures. After this change, they would have no idea until after they were admitted. They might get a generous financial aid package that brings the cost down to the price of their local state university, or they might get nothing except loans. The systems used to determine financial aid packages are opaque and not well-publicized, so the outcome is unpredictable.
In 2009, I applied to a broad sample of 14 schools on the east coast. They were a mix of "elite" private and flagship public universities. My parents were comfortably middle-class. I was lucky enough to get into most of them, and so I had the opportunity to compare financial offers. In maybe 1 case out of 12, I would have had to pay the full sticker price. The rest would have been heavily "discounted", but the discount varied widely between schools, from ~5% off the total cost of attendance, to 60% off, to 100% off (full ride). For the private universities the "discount" came from a mix of "need-based aid" and merit scholarships, while for the public universities it was exclusively from merit scholarships.
In this system, you don't know what the financial offer is until you get in, there are possible windfalls from getting a generous financial offer, and it's difficult to predict in advance what the financial offer will be until you get in. The incentives here are obvious: student who are conscious about the cost of their education have a strong incentive to "play the lottery" by applying to as many schools as is feasible for them, while biasing towards schools that are known to provide generous financial packages.
I intuitively believed the strongest explanation in this excellent essay (the common application) but it is likely easy to test for.
Right at the top of the essay is a list of rejection rate increases. OF those only the UCs (which have their own common app I believe) and MIT have their own application. All the others use the common application. Now that chart is merely the most affected, but 85% use the common so that is pretty indicative. In addition MIT is pretty low out of that 20 (which is still distressingly high).
As anecdote: my son applied for early action, got in before the general deadline, and didn't apply elsewhere. But his plan was that if he had not been accepted he would simply have pushed the button on the common app to blast the rest of his pool. The cost was only in application fees, nothing else. Whereas as Alexander notes, before the common app every application was unique and a hassle. So my kid's plan clearly supports this theory.
Thanks for the useful info! I'm going to apply to Uni this year. All I need is just to improve my writing skills. I always was bad at writing. But I've already found one writing service here https://uk.edusson.com/dissertation-help for grammar and plagiarism check. Hope with their help I'll get good grades in English.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 239 ms ] thread[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Entrance_Examination_–_A... [2] https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d3d674e7841444d78457a6333566d54/...
This article is hitting the nail on the head. It's not a glut of international students taking up all the spots because they'll pay more. That's not why you didn't get in. It's not legacies taking your spot in the class. There really are not that many unqualified legacies at Yale and Harvard. It's not blacks or latinos taking your spot via affirmative action. The blacks and latinos at Yale, Harvard or MIT likely outclass you along any dimension on which we'd care to take a truly objective comparative measure.
Here's reality, there are just a whole lot more people trying to get into college now. It was easy before, but if you want that spot today, you have to beat out a lot more people to get it. That's why we have all the bribes and whatnot going on. If a thousand people or whatever are all going after the same spot, it's not likely yours will be the winning application. So people try to game the system instead. But even with the increased competition, our schools are relatively easy to get into. In America, you can always get into some school.
My kids can claim hispanic status through their (very very Mexican mother) and conventional wisdom is that they can both breeze into any college they care to by checking the right box on the application. Whether that's true or not, I've always warned them not to rely on it - if they coast in and find themselves surrounded by people who know the material backward and forward while they're still struggling with the basics, they're going to end up coasting right back out.
The blacks and hispanics at MIT or wherever, they are definitely not "coasters". That's an urban myth that will be roundly dispelled about 15 minutes into a working relationship with one of them.
I still learned math, I still got hired at 2 top companies.
I don't value the name of your college, I'll listen to your answers to interview questions.
[Edit--added dates.]
I agree w/ your argument, but there are probably other factors that have changed w/ college applications.
The article seems to disagree w/ my point below, but from my anecdotal vantagepoint, I think there is a kernel of truth to my opinion: I see many 2nd and 3rd tier schools near me (I'm in the eastern US) opening themselves up to foreign undergrads. I don't know the reason for this, but my suspicion is that these schools need to stave off the onslaught from entities like Coursera and edX. As such, they are trawling from bodies, wherever they can get them. I've met numerous foreign undergrads who can barely speak English and my thought is usually "How could the University of _______ accept you in good conscience and move you toward graduation when you can't even understand your lecturers?"
e.g., I taught a class at a local university a few years ago. Class saw an influx of students from 1 particular country over a few years. Most of the foreign students from this country could barely speak English and it was obvious from "pop" quizzes that they didn't understand the material (which is understandable if you can't understand the language). They all tried to cheat on the exams (using a remarkably elaborate scheme). Eventually, I figured it out and I failed them. The mastermind emailed me and said that he knew he did not deserve to pass, but if he failed he would need an additional semester to complete his engineering degree.[1] IMO, the university behaved unethically by admitting these students into a system that they are not equipped to legitimately succeed in.
Anyway, I assume that if you increase your applicant pool from outside the US, the acceptance rates will drop--at least for a little while. I know that's not the only reason for the drop, but it might be part of the issue.
[1] After that, I stopped getting students from that country in my class.
Some of the ways colleges can combat this on their own is by trying to jump the rest of the system through early admission (that creeps earlier and earlier over time), or by giving out exploding offers (I don't think this is nearly as common).
The solution is to go to a deferred-acceptance algorithm such as Gale-Shapley. It's a relatively minor change, adding a third party that matches students to colleges algorithmically. The students send in a rank-ordering of the colleges they wish to attend, and colleges send in a rank-ordering of which students they'd prefer to admit (along with quantity). The students get their most-preferred college that likes them enough to admit them over others, and the colleges run zero risk of sending out too many offers.
School in the US is weird.
[1]: https://www.commonapp.org/
How did you find time to visit over a dozen colleges?
If everyone did that it'd turn the system around and have the colleges bidding for and trying to attract you.
In the UK they only let you apply to some small number of colleges (universities), and only let you apply to one elite college.
With that said, I also know lots of people that visited lots of colleges, doing a road trip or something spring break during high school. I didn’t and honestly don’t know why someone would.
Apply to many universities that interest you, and then go visit the ones that give admits.
Visiting local schools is important because you need to ensure that the details work. Can you get from your parents home to class during rush hour? Can you get from class to your weekend job?
If you are going far away from home though, who cares. What you can do in Fargo North Dakota are very different what you can do in Maui Hawaii, but either way you there are plenty of things to do. You will find out when you get there. If forced to either you will find something you like that you didn't know before. You will meet new friends.
For example moving to a college and realising you can’t get anywhere in the area without driving and you’re a walking person.
Either way visiting campus isn't really required, either you are cut out for anything or you already are not cut out because it isn't close to home.
You’re arguing you’ll probably be fine wherever so don’t bother yourself to learn anything about the community you’ll be joining before you go. I’m saying do research into where you want to be. How can you argue against informing yourself?
Note, if you are disabled in some way you might need to research campus and town are accessible to your needs. Most people don't have this consideration.
3.3: Could the issue be increasing number of applications per student?
Speaking as someone who has done research on selection and standard testing, and whose first-hand experiences support what I see from the theory and research, this is kind of horrifying, because it inevitably leads to increases in bullshit.
The accuracy of any of the selection methods we use in education is very poor. It just is. Standardized tests, "holistic review", all of it. It's not useless, but it is poor. It's the sort of thing that works well for a certain level of selectivity, but not past it. Once you go past it, you're selecting on well-impressioned noise, and incentivizing bullshit.
Somehow this all seems related in my mind to the rise of concerns about replicability in science, college admissions scams, and the age of fraud in general (https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/04/th...). Something is broken. Probably many things.
I'm curious, as someone who was slightly involved with a documentary [1] exposing pitfalls of standardized testing. Generally the SAT only has shown a weak correlation between test scores and first year (some studies I read showed only first semester, but I don't have them on hand right now) collegiate performance [2].
[1] https://m.imdb.com/title/tt3393042/ [2] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/01/26/new-research-...
That's not what your cite says. The InsideHigherEd article actually shows a strong correlation between SAT and grades but Aquinas identified a minority % of schools where it didn't. Please carefully read the 3 bullet points again and notice the minority percentages.
Your qualifier of "Generally" in your comment is misrepresenting Aguinis' findings.
Correlation was .82 between the SAT and the armed forces vocational aptitude battery, which is designed as an IQ test.
https://pumpkinperson.com/2016/12/14/how-well-does-the-sat-c...
Correlation was 0.48 between SAT and Raven Progressive Matrices.
https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-...
I hate that piece because most of what he's referring to has been dealt with for decades. It's like "narcissist who knows nothing about a field doesn't bother to learn anything about it and as a result takes down a strawman to make himself look good."
Broadly speaking, IQ tests tend to include a lot of cultural assumptions and therefore members of the in-group will test higher than members of out-groups of the same aptitude. IQ tests are therefore treated as discriminatory (disproportionate impact) "by default." The administration of a particular test for a specific purpose can usually be OK'd by either showing that particular test is not discriminatory, or by showing that particular test has a measurable correlation to the specific purpose for which it's used. My understanding is that "specific purpose" in the employment context means the individual job description, not just hiring in general.
I wonder if there's an "IQ test" that unfairly disadvantages non-minority candidates. It would be interesting to see the results if the same pool of people (minority and non-minority) take both tests.
IQ isn't the only correlate of success. I think if you look at it all, there's a large dose of conscientiousness (which standardized testing companies are now going after), and attractiveness/charisma...
... but that's on the individual side of things. There's also a whole host of societal and random stuff that is outside the control of the individual, or maybe is significant to a person, but that studies tend to treat as irrelevant.
Also, saying that the SAT is useful as a selection device doesn't mean it's the only useful selection device, or that as a selection device it's very good. Offhand I don't remember the numbers, but standardized test score probably correlates .45 or so with first-year college grades? Think about that for a second. First, that's a ton of noise. That's not very predictive at all. Second, that's first-year college grades. Change the criterion but it's still the same: your best tool really is a pretty fuzzy predictor.
So now take this very fuzzy predictor, add some other fuzzy predictors that at best get things up to like maybe .6 correlation? Still fuzzy. Now you're going to be really selective on these things? What you're going to end up with is a lot of people who would have done as well but for whom the stars didn't align right at a particular period in their life. But now we as a society have this crazy income inequality, rent-seeking monopolies of all forms, and a general winner-takes all climate, so these small meaningless differences get amplified tenfold.
The conversations about this too have this kind of all-or-nothing quality, like you're forced to choose between "standardized tests are meaningless" or "standardized tests are valid predictors for a large portion of people so we need to treat them as infallible predictors for everyone." The truth is really much greyer than these positions: yes they predict, but they predict pretty weakly, all things considered, and generally for people who fit into a certain box. This all might be fine, except now we've structured our society in part around these oversimplified assumptions, pretending it works when it doesn't really. It might be ok when there's lots of second chances, lots of opportunities for people to get back on their feet from the vagaries of life, and good opportunities in general for everyone, but when resources gets hoarded by fewer and fewer, there's more noise, that's compounded by people gaming the system, etc. etc. etc.
Just as a thought exercise: what do most human traits look like in terms of distribution? They're pretty normal, pretty Gaussian. What does income look like? Not that, not at all. The discrepancy between them should be shocking to everyone.
No is saying it is, clearly there other factors that may be much more important but IQ is clearly a factor.
The SAT when combined with the high school GPA (HSGPA) has an adjusted correlation correlation coefficient of 0.56 with first-year GPA, meaning the combined measurement accurately predicts how a potential college applicant will perform in their first year of college 56% of the time. [1]
That's actually pretty good, what other proposed metrics can say their signals match outcomes with 56% validity? How much you liked their essay?
Lower SAT scores have about 63% retention rate for first-year students whereas high SAT scores have about a 95% retention rate [2]. That is, high schoolers with poor SATs drop out of college about 40% of the time in their first year.
Standardized tests have many problems -- obviously -- but no one has developed a less unfair system.
When colleges abandon standardized tests what else are they relying on? Random signals made up by admissions officers? That's worse than job interviewing.
I have no problem criticizing standardized testing, but I feel everyone who does should be obligated to propose a better alternative method with a higher validity rate than 56%.
[1] https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED563202.pdf
[2] https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED563471.pdf
Thaaat's not what "correlation" means.
https://blog.udemy.com/correlation-coefficient-interpretatio...
If you have a better description, it's more helpful to chime in with that instead of "You're wrong!"
If you took a random sample of cases, half of them wouldn’t exhibit a direct relationship b/w SAT and first year GPA and half nothing (unless the data is _super_ weird). Instead, SAT would be instructive-ish in predicting first year GPA for all those cases.
The point was to draw a connection for the general audience, not present the most scientifically accurate description of a relationship between two variables -- that's what the links to the research are for.
Frankly this is not correct either, that would be right if we were talking about a coefficient of determination aka R^2 but we are not. we are talking about correlation coefficients which are totally different.
>Explaining half the variation, and the other half?
In the context of coefficients of determination(WHICH ARE NOT RELEVANT IN THIS CASE) this would mean that those variables explains 50% of the variance and the other 50% is either unexplained or explained by other variables.
>If you have a better description, it's more helpful to chime in with that instead of "You're wrong!"
>the combined measurement accurately predicts how a potential college applicant will perform in their first year of college 56% of the time
Your statement was indeed totally wrong and honestly the lack of statistical understanding in this thread, among all participants, is a little disturbing.
Correlation coefficients imply just that, correlation. Nothing more, your "simplification" was totally incorrect and makes implications which are in no way supported by the data.
Your own citation explains correlation quite clearly -
"A correlation indicates the extent to which variables are linearly related and can range from –1.0 to 1.0 (Miles and Shevlin, 2001). A correlation of 1.0, for example, indicates a perfect positive linear relationship. A general rule of thumb for interpreting correlation coefficients is offered by Cohen (1988): a small correlation has an absolute value of approximately 0.1; a medium correlation has an absolute value of approximately 0.3; and a large correlation has an absolute value of approximately 0.5 or higher"
Theres no way to simplify this as correlation is already one of the simplest concepts in statistics...
> meaning the combined measurement accurately predicts how a potential college applicant will perform in their first year of college 56% of the time.
"accurately predicts...56% of the time" implies that half of predictions are 'accurate', which most readers would interpret as 'correct' i.e. knowing SAT + HSGPA allows you to state FYGPA _exactly_ for about half of cases. That's not what the research you cited says. Rather, the square of the multiple correlation R (which is exactly R^2, the coefficient of determination) indicates how much of the variance in the output variable is explained by the input variables. That quantity _must_ be communicated in terms of the strength of the relationship, not accuracy for a given or share of cases as it doesn't tell us anything about a given case. One could say it tells us about 30% (0.56^2, correction from my statement above) of the information we'd need to know to perfectly predict the outcome, or that the relationship is better than random, but doesn't predict perfectly, or ...
Additionally, table 5 of the link you cited indicates the adjust correlation coefficient b/w FYGPA and the combination of HSGPA and SAT is 0.62. None of the numbers in that table are 0.56, so I'm not sure where you pulled that exact number from. I've used 0.56/56% above to be clear which quantity I'm referring to.
Again, if you can simplify this in a way more accurate than I have, great, be my guest-- I look forward to reading it.
R^2, coefficient of determination, output variable variance, etc etc -- most readers aren't going to go that deep in the math. For those who do, like you, the links to the actual research is provided.
But so far all I see are data scientists complaining about how my description is not 100% statistically accurate without providing any alternative explanation that doesn't devolve into variance of output variables.
Again, be my guest to show me I'm wrong, but what you wrote above is not something that would be easy to understand for the general audience, IMHO.
> "accurately predicts...56% of the time" implies that half of predictions are 'accurate', which most readers would interpret as 'correct' i.e. knowing SAT + HSGPA allows you to state FYGPA _exactly_ for about half of cases.
This interpretation is easy to arrive at, and clearly does not correspond to a reasonable understanding of the source, even for a general audience.
I provide two suggestions above:
> One could say it tells us about 30% of the information we'd need to know to perfectly predict the outcome, or that the relationship is better than random, but doesn't predict perfectly
I appreciate your commitment to academic rigor but sometimes oversimplifying things, even at the cost of mathematical accuracy, is enough for a general audience who aren't going to compute variance of output variables.
You're right that a general audience isn't going to look at the source, nor think about variance of output variables. Therefore, it's the responsibility of us as communicators of statistics to relate the conclusions that can be drawn from the data in a way that first and foremost is not wrong or misleading, and secondly captures the concept as accurately as possible for the audience.
The first principle is the overriding obligation. Your simplification can capture as little of the information and conclusions supported by the data as you want, but it cannot imply or state conclusions that are not supported.
You're getting this response to your statement, from me and others, because your interpretation of the source can easily be read as drastically overstating the character (and strength) of the relationship supported by the data - even if that's not what you intended.
I'm getting this response to my statement, from you and many other data scientists, who can't accept oversimplifying math, but all of whom have failed to produce a general description in plain English.
In some ways it's like the test-- everyone hates it but no one has a better alternative. You've complained maybe 7 or 8 times in this thread about how scientifically inaccurate my general summary is but have not produced a description that a regular person could understand in 5 words or less, with no technical jargon.
somewhat associated with
partially explained by the combination of
... HSGPA And SAT’
‘
"Something is partially explained by a combination of numbers"?
That says nothing semantic of value. Better to exaggerate the causal relationship and give a sense of meaning than offer meaningless generics like that, because at least the general reader intuits a sense of the universe of the relationship. The above implies nothing.
1) Your description is 0% correct; and 2) It's not a complaint. Maybe you don't know what a correlation coefficient is. That's okay -- I don't know what polyfinite rings are.
"Correlation is a number in [-1,1] where -1 means predictably inversely related and 1 means predictably directly related". What is correlation 0.5? There isn't even an unique definition of "correlation", man.
The best thing you could do is to produce a table of correlation coefficients for comparison. That would communicate some qualitative nuance as to what a 0.5 correlation really means.
You can also try to do something like a bootstrap or kernel density or use a prior distribution to claim that the probability that increment dx leads to an increment of dy or more is... That's more technically involved, but satisfies your desire of saying something specific that correlation coefficients do not allow you to say.
You and a couple of others have provided plenty of context for the serious data scientist who wants to understand the exact nature of the relationship between these two variables, but 99% of readers do not understand much less want to read about "kernel density".
Again, my challenge remains open: instead of complaining about inaccuracy, try to render the relationship in plain English.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anscombe%27s_quartet
"It's the strength of the relationship"
I happen to like:
"It's how perfectly you can fit a straight line to them."
You can be mathematically accurate without being mathematically precise. Better imprecise but correct than incorrect but precise.
If you're trying to give a quantitative lay picture of what exactly 0.56 linear correlation means, you need to still be quantitatively right, while the above are quantitative. Pictures and examples can help. "For perspective, 0.56 is about the correlation between <example> and <example>"
Saying there is a quantitative strength to a relationship is, to a regular person, meaningless. Am I .56 in love with my wife?
Can I fit in a straight line to her?
These are not good descriptions. Of course HN is full of data scientists who wildly object to oversimplifying statistical relationships -- luckily you are here to give the detailed mathematical context. But these are not simplified descriptions for a general audience.
That the average person would not understand a particular accurate description of a subject does not, in and of itself, make a completely inaccurate alternative description less wrong or even a good simplification.
[1] http://www.bwgriffin.com/gsu/courses/edur7130/images/twelve_...
This is a totally incorrect interpretation of what Correlation means. Correlation is generally a very weak measure and the .56 value only tells you there is a "Medium - High" level of correlation between the two things being measured. Nothing more. This is discussed in the paper you linked.
This is a totally incorrect interpretation of what correlation is.
Trustable assessments would go a long way to accurately rewarding merit.
But teachers still prefer teachers over standard tests, and they shun conversation with their researching peers. The classroom is their kingdom and that’s how people prefer it.
The objective should be the creation of a system that allows teachers to retain the flexibility to modify curriculum in a manner appropriate to their specific student population while also maintaining the trust and reliability benefits found in standardized tests.
These expectations are the root of the current outrage culture. It's as if now that we have these wonderful technological advances we assume every problem should have been solved by now, and get outraged when we realize we don't live in a utopia.
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without making a value judgment about it,
I think an underappreciated aspect of our current spot in history is that we've had an explosion of resources that ambitious, resourceful people can leverage.
Increasingly these resources don't have gatekeepers around them, and there isn't anything keeping highschoolers from accessing them.
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I suspect the kids actually in the running for Harvard similar places, have accomplished much more than those kids would have accomplished 20 years or so ago.
I think the greater “problem” is that merit is impossible to define. The risk of not joining the elites at 18 should be lowered if anything else.
I definitely agree with the "The risk of not joining the elites at 18 should be lowered if anything else. "
but I don't think that's the would we live in
Schools like Harvard have become more and more adept at correlating themselves with success
At the same time they cause it less and less
Harvard is really a place for people who don't actually need Harvard to succeed
You don't need Harvard either
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Apart_(book)
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I think youtube and twitter are sort of interesting tools in this regard.
I see a lot of commentary about how they're tools of distraction, but I'm not sure that's quite right.
I think the better way to think about it is they're going to send you down rabbit holes that will magnify whatever habits you already have.
If you're into cat videos, youtube is going to send you down that rabbit hole,
If you're into physics lectures, youtube is going to send you down that rabbit hole,
youtube is magnifying the differences between what the people who are into cat videos and what the people who are into physics lectures know
twitter works like this too
Ironically, the people perhaps pushing the narrative are often themselves HYPSM grads and beneficiaries of elite status. Same with the folks who claim "the college you go to doesn't matter".
I still don't understand why someone can apply with no major but has to write essays about life experiences and aspirations and what they want to do in life. And, test scores matter but not really and also different classes of people (race, gender, legacy, sports, economic) have different score scales.
All this makes it very unclear and hidden causing additional stress.
Why can SAT/ACT and perhaps school GPA be the sole criteria? And for sports, affirmative action,.. just have separate additional seats.
But how about this: an objective test that anyone can take however many times they want, as long as they have a high school diploma.
That’s essentially the Brazilian system. There are arguments to be made about well off kids still getting an advantage because their parents can afford prep schools, but the government counters (at least partially) that by introducing quotas for certain disadvantaged groups.
I have many misgivings about many things in Brazil, but I do think the university admissions process down there is the fairest I’ve seen in my life.
scholastic aptitude is a very important part of admissions criteria, but it's not the only thing colleges care about. for example, they also care about things like extracurriculars because these indicate that a student is more likely to participate in campus organizations.
you personally might not care about orgs and sports teams (I certainly didn't) but some of the students they want to attract do. there needs to be a critical mass of sports and orgs people to make these things viable.
For one thing, it simply isn't possible to have truly "objective" criteria for admissions.
If it were only based on standardized test scores, the bulk of the students that got in to the most elite schools would be ones who went to elite private high schools and perhaps had extra highly-paid tutoring or those who enjoyed the obsessive life-long dedication of a tiger-mom. That would skew the population to students from a narrow demographic along with a very small number of unicorns. Forget about late-bloomers, promising students that went to crappy high-schools, forget about making up for decades of exclusionary practices. And after all that, guess what, the children of the uber-rich would STILL get in because a pile of money big enough to pay for a building will ALWAYS bend reality.
The most elite schools will always have their admissions under a magnifying glass, but there's a lot of excellent universities out there which offer a superb education and don't have outrageous admissions requirements. A student who got top-scores and excellent grades can still go to their pick of a large number of these other fine schools if they get rejected from Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Stanford/MIT/Caltech because of losing out to some intangible criteria.
This is both correct and why the Asian students' Harvard suits offend me. If we're holding the bar at Harvard or zilch, what the hell did I spend 4 years of my time on?
That's me! I was rejected from one of those schools and ended up at a "tier 2" school, and have been very successful. IOW, getting rejected from a "tier 1" school isn't a big deal, and a student may be better off at a "lesser" school.
Edit: this comment, while obviously passing some judgment on elite schools, should not be taken as an endorsement of the parent comment. Admitting based on test scores has severe issues in a society where schooling quality and resources are so unevenly distributed.
A poor person can study for the SATs just like the rich kids (expensive tutors don't actually raise the score very much), but there is no way they will have the same opportunities (money, time, connections) for the sort of fancy extracurriculars that rich kids do to impress admission committees.
The actual solution is not messing around with admission criteria, but rather tackling the unequal distribution of opportunity at the primary and secondary school level.
When I compare the American system to my home country’s system, which based on thorough, objective testing, people tell me the US system is better in terms of determining if someone is “college material.”
IMO the extremely subjective nature of it only enables discrimination.
Because of what corporate HR calls "cultural fit". Harvard is not looking necessarily for top students or even students with the most potential. It's looking for "Harvard men". While there is some well-grounded suspicion that corporate HR cultural fit is a mask for discrimination, we know this was the case with university admissions. MIT is an academic powerhouse because it was willing to take the influx of smart Jewish kids that applied to Harvard after WWII and didn't get in because they were Jewish.
This is the ideal person for an ivy league: - Parents moved to an expensive zip code so kid gets into good schools - Parents and kids deal with lots of bureaucracies. Clubs, pastimes and volunteering... which are all specifically designed to get you into college. These places don't motivate critical thinking. They REQUIRE constant observance of rules and compliance to the rule makers. - Massive student loans for the majority
The whole idea is that if someone graduates as a reporter, that person might voluntarily choose to not talk about things like, how we started a war of aggression to further our economic interest.
This goes also for the engineer working on the latest westernization of some random object/system.
Colleges don't want the best and the brightest. They want the best and the brightest... who are compliant and who have lots invested in the 'system'... commitment leads to leverage. They want 'team players'.
They also want to give as much advantage as they can to the existing elites. So... they require things that require money. That way they can say, 'we aren't turning away the best and brightest'... we are just turning away people who are smarter in favor of 'team players' who went to school practice, and ballet, and the model UN, and etc... which are of course out of reach for the average US family.
In the US, a solid majority of colleges -- including the Ivies -- were established first as religious institutions. Harvard and Yale were established to educate clergy (first) and also civil servants maybe. All these colleges in the Midwest that collectively provide a substantial portion of college education: established by religious groups, often along ethnic lines. Bible colleges were the first colleges in America.
At their founding, these colleges were not interested in just educating the 'smartest'. They were founded to pass on values within certain communities. Protestant colleges and Catholic colleges were not interchangeable. Lutheran colleges and Presbyterian colleges were not interchangeable. Swedish Lutheran and Norwegian Lutheran colleges are not quite interchangeable! While many of these colleges have left religion in their pasts, others have not. I taught for two years at a Lutheran college and interviewed at a Catholic college for a tenure-track position, and have spent time at two R1 land-grant institutions. All these institutions have explicitly different goals. Using the SAT/ACT and GPA to admit students to a Lutheran institution that still has a service every day and starts events with prayer just doesn't work for anyone, while the land-grant institution has a particular focus on economic and academic development for the geographic region.
[1] http://tech.mit.edu/V126/N41/41Switz.html
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" But of course there’s a reason that it’s so difficult to get into Yale – it’s because Yale has only 5,400 students, in a country of over 315 million people! By contrast, McGill has over 30,000, and University of Toronto has 67,000 undergraduates, serving a country of only 35 million people. That means there’s roughly one spot at Yale for every 58,000 Americans, compared to one spot at McGill for every 1,100 Canadians. No wonder American life is more competitive.
Furthermore, all of the best schools in the United States are tiny. Here is a list of the top 10, as ranked by U.S. News & World Report, along with the number of students (undergraduate, I believe):
Princeton: 5,336
Harvard: 6,658
Yale: 5,405
Columbia: 6,068
Stanford: 7,063
Chicago: 5,590
Duke: 6,655
MIT: 4,503
Upenn: 9,682
CIT: 997
Dartmouth: 4,193
That means the top 10 universities in the United States – a country of over 315 million people – at any given time are educating a grand total of only 62,150 students.
By contrast, here are the rough numbers of undergraduates at the top 3 Canadian universities:
McGill: 30,000
UBC: 47,500
UofT: 67,000
So the top 3 Canadian schools are at any given time educating a grand total of 144,500 students – more than twice the total of the top 10 U.S. schools. (In fact, the University of Toronto alone has more student capacity than the top 10 U.S. schools combined.) The United States has almost exactly 9 times the population of Canada, so in order to have the same sort of capacity in higher education, the top 27 schools in the United States would have to have 1.3 million students."
Full article here: http://induecourse.ca/the-bottleneck-in-u-s-higher-education...
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I should also add that U of T, McGill and UBC are extremely good schools, and the people who go to them are very smart. I teach LSAT prep, and find that students at those schools tend to have high average scores, comparable to the US top ten.
I have no idea why US schools don't take more students. Whichever one of them broke ranks would make untold amount of money.
I wonder if part of the issue is that they're generally non-profits and so money motivation doesn't work the same way it would in the private sector. Meanwhile, the US government system is generally broken and so no one pushes the universities to expand the same way Canadian ones do.
MIT could make 5x the money while still taking in extremely qualified students. But, they're a non-profit, so they don’t really care about money. The prestige has more of a perceived value.
Us top 10 schools have a lot of money. But you’d be astounded to see what they could collect if they were truly profit motivated.
Consider Ray Ban/Burberry who at points in the past crossed the line from exclusivity into mass market and suffered a reputation hit, only to go under new management and tightly control the supply.
https://www.berkeley.edu/about/bythenumbers
Interestingly, the elite research universities on your list above do enroll comparable numbers of graduate students to Berkeley (or Michigan, UCLA). The big difference is in the undergraduate enrollment. Also interesting is the way the list shuffles up when you consider top PhD programs or top science and engineering programs. Many of the schools in the top 10 on the US News List are replaced by top-50 schools with a much larger representation of public universities.
Berkeley, for instance, by many measurements, has more top-5 PhD programs (a good representation of department strength in research) than any other university, including Harvard and Stanford. Michigan isn't far behind (and keep in mind, Berkeley's med school is split off into UCSF).
Even US News's engineering school rankings, which I do think overwhelmingly favor very small private universities with large endowments, show this trend.
https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-engineering...
There are privates on there (Stanford, MIT, Columbia), but now you have Berkeley, Michigan, Georgia Institute of Technology, Purdue, University of Illinois, and UC San Diego and Texas at Austin at the 11th spot.
One thing the US News report rankings don't do is reward scale, but scale does matter. UCLA, for instance, enrolls more low income students than the entire Ivy League combined. Until recently, this was true of Berkeley as well, and numbers are still much much higher there - not just as a percentage, but in absolute numbers.
Private universities receive a lot of subsidies and favorable tax treatment on the grounds that they provide a public good - personally, I'm not enthusiastic about providing this subsidy to universities with massive endowments that enroll a tiny number of students.
This guy ran the numbers and found even the worse-ranked college still provided a positive ROI https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/the-bermuda-triangle-o...
And this is the WORST university we give a ranking to? A $309,000 estimated return on investment, not-adjusted-for-major. You have to visit Payscale, click “See Full List”, and scroll past 1,752 colleges before you find one that doesn’t have a positive RoI — not-adjusted-for-major.
The bad ROI for Fair and Poor students is mostly driven by their lower probability of actually graduating and getting the degree.
I highly recommend the book if you're interested.
[1] https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11225.html
I'm pretty sure the market clearing quantity of college-educated labor increases with supply just like most goods and services, so, yes, the marginal college graduation should increase the number of white-collar jobs (and reduces rather than exacerbates the positional advantage, because in addition to increasing market clearit quantity, increased supply reduces market clearing price.)
I'm arguing that this degree-required job isn't created ex-nihilo, but rather at the expense of the "best" job that used to not have a degree requirement. In other words, the average price of hiring a college graduate goes down because we're now hiring them as daycare workers and firefighters, and the positional advantage of a college degree now includes eligibility for these jobs.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_marriage_problem
I think this analysis is excellent, but I don't think the Common App explains the increase in applications-per-admission. There's another significant factor that causes students to apply to dozens of schools: No one can accurately forecast what a given school will cost anymore.
At some point (I believe in the late '00s, but could be wrong), elite schools started to extend their financial aid programs to include students from middle-class families. Harvard announced this in 2007[1], Yale and Princeton followed quickly, and most other elite schools seem to have done similar things, albeit with more constrained resources.
Prior to this change, a student from a family with middle-class income or above could know with reasonable certainty what a given college would cost: they would expect to pay the tuition, fees, etc. listed on the brochures. After this change, they would have no idea until after they were admitted. They might get a generous financial aid package that brings the cost down to the price of their local state university, or they might get nothing except loans. The systems used to determine financial aid packages are opaque and not well-publicized, so the outcome is unpredictable.
In 2009, I applied to a broad sample of 14 schools on the east coast. They were a mix of "elite" private and flagship public universities. My parents were comfortably middle-class. I was lucky enough to get into most of them, and so I had the opportunity to compare financial offers. In maybe 1 case out of 12, I would have had to pay the full sticker price. The rest would have been heavily "discounted", but the discount varied widely between schools, from ~5% off the total cost of attendance, to 60% off, to 100% off (full ride). For the private universities the "discount" came from a mix of "need-based aid" and merit scholarships, while for the public universities it was exclusively from merit scholarships.
In this system, you don't know what the financial offer is until you get in, there are possible windfalls from getting a generous financial offer, and it's difficult to predict in advance what the financial offer will be until you get in. The incentives here are obvious: student who are conscious about the cost of their education have a strong incentive to "play the lottery" by applying to as many schools as is feasible for them, while biasing towards schools that are known to provide generous financial packages.
[1] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2007/12/harvard-annou...
Right at the top of the essay is a list of rejection rate increases. OF those only the UCs (which have their own common app I believe) and MIT have their own application. All the others use the common application. Now that chart is merely the most affected, but 85% use the common so that is pretty indicative. In addition MIT is pretty low out of that 20 (which is still distressingly high).
As anecdote: my son applied for early action, got in before the general deadline, and didn't apply elsewhere. But his plan was that if he had not been accepted he would simply have pushed the button on the common app to blast the rest of his pool. The cost was only in application fees, nothing else. Whereas as Alexander notes, before the common app every application was unique and a hassle. So my kid's plan clearly supports this theory.